of order on the whole and makes it seem magnificently staged, right up to the climax of the final apotheosis. However, even if the disorder is comparable in all of his books, they do not all make the same move of retaking the reins at the end and pretending to have controlled and guided his steeds all along. Here too we should not see it as anything but a game.

2. A very common idea in Ruskin. Cf. St Mark’s Rest: ‘No day of my life passes now to its sunset, without leaving me more doubtful of all our cherished contempts, etc. and more earnest to discover, etc…’ (St. Mark’s Rest, ‘The Shrine of the Slaves’) – and passim throughout his work.
3. Cf. the same idea in Le Maître de la Mer by Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé.
4. Cf. ‘You may observe, as an almost unexceptional character in the “sagacious wisdom” of the Protestant clerical mind, that it instinctively assumes the desire of power and place not only to be universal in Priesthood, but to be always purely selfish in the ground of it. The idea that power might possibly be desired for the sake of its benevolent use, so far as I remember, does not once occur in the pages of any ecclesiastical historian of recent date.’ (The Bible of Amiens, III. 33)
5. Meanwhile, the continually observed fact that many people of modest background but distinguished by their talents are snobs simply means that they often forego the society of other talented people in order to seek out the company of ‘ignorant and foolish’ men whom they are happy to see and be seen with.
6. This idea seems to us very beautiful in truth because we can feel the spiritual use to which Ruskin is about to put it; we can feel that the ‘friends’ here are merely tokens, and through these friends whom we cannot choose we already sense, about to appear, the friends we can choose, the main characters of the lecture: books, who have not yet made their entrance, like the star actress who does not come on stage in the first act.

And we can see this specious but nevertheless fair reasoning as a kind of Platonic argument, which Ruskin, the disciple and brother of Plato, elsewhere conducts so naturally: ‘Still, Critias, you cannot choose your friends however you want…’ But here – as so often elsewhere in the Greeks, who have said all the true things but have not sought out all the true, more hidden pathways connecting those things – the comparison is not convincing. For one can be in a situation in life which does permit one to choose the friends one wants (a situation in life combined, of course, with intelligence and charm, without which the people whom one might choose would not be one’s friends in the true sense of the word, but in the end all these attributes can be found together; I do not say often, but it is enough that I can find a few examples in my own milieu). Even for these privileged beings, however, the friends they can choose at will cannot in any way take the place of books (which proves that books are not merely friends whom one can choose to be as wise as one wants), because in truth the essential difference between a book and a person is not the greater or lesser wisdom in one or the other but the way we communicate with them. Our mode of communication with people entails a loss of the active forces of our soul, while the wondrous miracle of reading on the other hand – communication in the bosom of solitude – concentrates and excites those forces. When you read, you receive another thought and are nonetheless alone, in the midst of your labour of thought, your aspiration, your personal activity: you receive another’s ideas in your spirit, in other words you can truly become one with those ideas, you are this other person and yet you cannot help but develop your own self with greater variety than if you were thinking alone; you are driven by another along your own path.

In conversation, even leaving aside the moral and social influences and the like which the presence of an interlocutor creates, communication takes place through the mediation of sounds, the spiritual blow is softened, inspiration and profound thought are impossible. What’s more, thought is falsified when it becomes spoken thought, as proven by the superiority of writers over those who enjoy and excel too much in conversation. (Despite the illustrious exceptions one might cite here, despite the testimony of someone like Emerson himself, who attributes a true virtue of inspiration to conversation, we can say that in general conversation puts us on the path of brilliant formulations or pure arguments but almost never on the path of profound impressions.)

Thus the graceful reason that Ruskin gives (the impossibility of choosing one’s friends and the possibility of choosing one’s books) is not the real reason. It is only a contingent reason – the real one is the essential difference between the two modes of communication. Again, the field from which one chooses one’s friends may not be restricted; granted, even in that case it is restricted to the living, but even if all of the dead were still alive they would still only be able to converse with us the same way the living do, and a conversation with Plato would still be a conversation, that is, an exercise immeasurably more superficial than reading. The value of the things we hear or read are of far less importance than the inner state which they can create in us, which can be profound only in solitude, or in the populated solitude of reading.

7. This distinction exists, of course, in the theory I was just sketching out. A man can inspire us only if we hear him in solitude, that is, if we read him, but he must also have been inspired himself. Solitude only allows us to put ourselves into the state in which the author found himself, a state which could not have been produced if the book were a spoken book; one can no more read while speaking than write while speaking. In re-reading this sentence of Ruskin’s, ‘A book is not a talking thing, but a written thing’, I feel as though I have contradicted him less than I thought. But in any case it must still be said that if a book is not a talking thing, but a written thing, it is also something read, not something listened to in conversation, and consequently it cannot be equated to a friend. If Ruskin did not say this, it is only because he was not trying to analyse the original state of soul of the reader.
8. ‘To perpetuate’ is there for the contrast. In reality, though, it is no longer the same voice that is to be perpetuated. If it were simply the same kind of voice – nothing but spoken words – then to perpetuate it would be as pointless as to carry it or multiply it.
9. James 4:14: ‘For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’ Compare this with two beautiful adaptations of the same verse, first in The Seven Lamps of Architecture: ‘and since our life must at the best be but a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the blast of the Furnace, and rolling of the Wheel’; second in the third lecture of Sesame and Lilies, ‘The Mystery of Life and Its Arts’: ‘whereas in earlier life, what little influence I obtained was due perhaps chiefly to the enthusiasm with which I was able to dwell on the beauty of the physical clouds, and of their colors in the sky; so all the influence I now desire to retain must be due to the earnestness with which I am endeavoring to trace the form and beauty of another kind of cloud than those; the bright cloud of which it is written -”What is your life? It is even as a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.’’’ (§96)
10. Note this sentence carefully, and compare the Queen of the Air, §106. [Ruskin’s note]

Here is the passage which Ruskin cites: ‘Thus far of Abbeville building. Now I have here asserted two things,- first, the foundation of art in moral character; next, the foundation of morsal character in war. I must make both these assertions clearer, and prove them. First, of the foundation of art in moral character. Of course art-gift and amiability of disposition are two different things; a good man is not necessarily a painter, nor does an eye for colour necessarily imply an honest mind. But great art implies the union of both powers: it is the expression, by an art-gift, of a pure soul. If the gift is not there, we can have no art at all; and if the soul – and a right soul too -is not there, the art is bad, however dexterous.’ The opposite assertion (and these opposites may perhaps meet if one extends the two ideas, not all the way to infinity, but to a certain height) was expressed with extraordinary grace by Whistler in his Ten O’Clock. – Also recall the passage in Stones of Venice on an archivolt of St Mark’s designed by an unknown artist: ‘I